Friedemann Heckel

Dear Thomas,

The show is now called “distractions.” I travelled five hundred kilometers north to a small summer house on the seashore to find out what this show wanted to be, who it really is. Five hundred kilometers to find a balance between focus and distraction. I still don’t really know for sure. A disparate array of motifs that have thrusted themselves upon me over the past two years, for example: September 7, 2025, the blood moon over Berlin.

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Friedemann Heckel's practice bridges personal memories and collective histories, translating archival fragments and found objects into works that linger between the familiar and the enigmatic. His watercolors, sculptures, and installations reflect on small moments of beauty that evoke nostalgia and build anticipation, melding together memories and possibilities alike.

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With works by Friedemann Heckel, Sebastian Stumpf, Margrét H. Blöndal and Joachim Bandau.

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To cover is to work with what’s already there. Cover also means shelter. To protect or hide. To conceal or disguise, to extend over time or space. To run for cover, to cover one’s back.

cover me softly, the main exhibition of the 2024 Beta Biennial, is an exploration of covers across disciplines, mediums, and geographies. Counter to notions of copying, stealing, imitating, and bootlegging that may each come with their own ethical slant, the cover provides an alternate set of relational vocabularies for understanding how transferences of knowledge and structures of authorship are circulated through art and design. By centering our vast interconnectedness, cover me softly opens new realms of possibility for doing, making, and being.

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With works by Margrét H. Blöndal, Dirk Braeckman, Seiichi Furuya and Friedemann Heckel.

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In his fourth exhibition at Galerie Thomas Fischer, Friedemann Heckel presents a series of watercolors that have been created since 2020. Based on photographs taken with his mobile phone, he painted large-scale still lifes and idiosyncratic portraits. The material itself comes to the foreground: the watercolor runs across the surface and frays, opening to the abstract and contrasting against the untouched white of the paper. And the figures? A captivating light brightens their faces and bodies, the light of a screen, the sun, a lighter. They seem lost in reverie or to be looking vaguely into the distance. What do they see? What do we see? Speculative melancholy and lurking premonitions.

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